He had never asked Amazon for a replacement, and the new consoles
were being shipped to a different address and a person he'd never
heard of. So basically, Amazon was sending out two new Xbox units
to someone in Portland — for free.

Neither McBay's Amazon account
nor his email had been hacked into. There were no suspicious
charges on his credit card. He reached out to Amazon to to tell
the company he hadn't ordered a replacement, and definitely not
to a random name at an address never associated with his
account.

McBay's Amazon incident,
described as "replacement fraud," wasn't the first of its kind.
As McBay notes in a blog post, the exact same thing was well-documented by
Amazon user Chris Cardinala few years ago. In fact, the address where
McBay's "replacement" Xbox units were sent was the same address
that Cardinal's "replacement" camera equipment was sent in 2012.
When Cardinal Googled the address in 2012, he found a cached post
on an Amazon forum complaining about the same problem.

The address belongs to ReShip.com, a company that offers international
residents a physical U.S. address to have products shipped before
being forwarded to them overseas.

The scam revolves around Amazon's customer service policy and the
fact that a customer service representative will dish out certain
nuggets of account information without much authentication.

In the case of Cardinal, and likely McBay as well, the scammer
just needed the name, email and billing address associated with
their accounts — which, at least in Cardinal's case, could be
easily found in the Whois directory for a website domain that he
owned — in order to convince a customer service rep to give out
the order history from their accounts.

Once the scammer had the order numbers for products purchased by
Cardinal and McBay, they could terminate the session with the
customer service rep, start another chat session with a new
representative and say they had never received the items for the
order numbers they just attained.

The fact that the scammer could convince an Amazon rep to ship
those products to a different name at a different address — an
address that's been used in similar frauds in the past — is what
McBay finds most troubling.

"I appreciate their consumer friendly no-hassle returns and
replacements, but why would they send a replacement to an address
that has never been associated with me, and is in a wholly
different state than the one the original item was sent to?" he
writes. "At the end of the day I'm not out any money here but
Amazon is out quite a bit of product and a *lot* of trust from
me."

Business Insider has reached out to Amazon about this
re-occurring replacement fraud.